


exeunt

by inktwice (Inkjade)



Category: Stranger (Forest of Secrets)
Genre: Forest of Secrets, Gen, Hugs, Korean dramas FTW, Missing Scene, Stranger (Forest of Secrets) - Freeform, fandom of one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 18:07:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15102140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/inktwice
Summary: Very much the sort of piece that only makes sense if you've watched the show (which you should!), and I've probably mangled something between the subtitles and my utter cluelessness re: Korean culture and language, but. I needed this scene.





	exeunt

**Author's Note:**

> Very much the sort of piece that only makes sense if you've watched the show (which you should!), and I've probably mangled something between the subtitles and my utter cluelessness re: Korean culture and language, but. I needed this scene.

She left Seo Dong-jae where he stood, frozen and wide-eyed. Seo Dong-jae was a smooth-talking fool and a liar, but Yeo-jin couldn’t help but pity him a little as she pelted up the stairs: he had looked like a shocked little boy staring at Chief Secretary Lee’s body, all the oily bravado slapped out of him.

The one she expected to find four floors up—the one she’d caught a glimpse of in the startled seconds after Lee Chang-joon had come crashing to earth in the only way she’d never wished on him—would, she expected, do little more than blink several times. She’d mark those blinks down with all the other tiny signs she collected and try to decrypt them later.

If she ever got a free damned moment again, that was. Had she any idea when she’d come to see about Park Moo-sung’s murder two months back what she was getting dragged into, she’d have fled for Pohang and turned herself into a farmer.

“Too much time sitting in chairs,” Yeo-jin muttered, taking a necessary second to lean against a pitted cement wall. She unholstered her gun and loaded it. In case.

He stood at the edge, close enough to make her heart thump unhappily. The wind plucked at his suit jacket and the hem of his pants. His posture was unchanged, though this was, so far as she knew, the first death in this long, odd case that he’d actually witnessed, and it was a colleague and mentor. “Mr. Hwang?” she said, to be certain. Fine, she thought when he didn’t answer, and demanded he raise his hands. Stubborn bastard. It didn’t look good. He never tried to _make_ it look good.

For a surreal moment when he turned, hands obediently raised, she thought she’d gotten it wrong. Hwang Si-mok was still on his way here, stuck in traffic or haring off toward some other clue and he’d left her to clean up a considerable mess again. It was some other prosecutor standing here on the edge, someone with the same hunched shoulders but straight back, the same fluffy hair. Some stranger with a fighting-tears sort of twist to his mouth and tired, sad eyes.

“Did you push him?” Yeo-jin blurted. It was the only thing she could imagine putting this much life in his face. She wished it unsaid even as it was coming out.

He didn’t even flinch. His gaze slipped away from hers, though, unsurprised. It was worse than if he’d flinched.

“Damn it,” Yeo-jin said, and holstered the gun. She edged closer, snared his sleeve when she was in arms’ reach, and carefully tugged him away from the drop. He came unresisting, his hands lowering to that typical slump, his eyes on the ground. She caught a glimpse of Seo Dong-jae hunched over Chief Secretary Lee far below, heard an aborted wail. She felt it echo against her fingers where they rested on Si-mok’s wrist: a tiny flinch.

Oh.

“They’ll be here any minute,” she said, and he took a breath, shook his head once sharply. He still had that look on him, something startled and sorrowing peeking out from under all the calm. It was folding back underneath, but not quickly enough. The world was about to fall in on them both, and if he couldn’t pull himself together before it did she would have a job, keeping him out of handcuffs.

Tortoise, tortoise, show me your head, Yeo-jin thought, and bit her cheek against a sudden swelling in her throat.

“I’m going to do something friends do now,” she said, feeling her way forward. She was probably going to confuse him terribly, she thought wryly. “Hold still and it will be over quickly.”

He raised his gaze to meet hers and blinked. She put an arm around his neck, feeling like a moron several times over. Si-mok stood a little straighter, but he did hold still: perfectly, stiffly still. “All right then, don’t make it easy or anything,” Yeo-jin sighed, and leaned in until she could get the other arm around him. He smelled like shampoo and sweat and concrete dust, a bizarrely human blend. He was in fact a tiny bit taller that her when he stood straight, she decided, and she huffed into his shirt collar. He was motionless as a statue. Probably he was comparing this to a hundred hugs he’d seen after trials or in investigations and trying to decide if she was hitting on him. She huffed again.

“Are we,” he said, low and so uninflected it took her a moment to realize it was a question.

“Friends?”

His nod brushed his ear against her temple. You moron, Han Yeo-jin, she thought, and sighed. “I think we are,” she said. “Don’t you?”

Si-mok got even more still. Then she felt his arms come up, like he thought he had to raise his hands again to prove himself unarmed. Then they came around her, very slowly, and one hand settled against her back right between her shoulders. It felt very much like he was imitating something he’d seen done, and the thought brought the swelling back to her throat, a hard lump of sorrow for him.

“Try squeezing,” she said, amazed that her voice came out evenly. “A little, anyway. It’s better.”

“Than what?” he muttered, but the hand between her shoulders pressed fractionally and she returned that pressure with her arms, careful to keep it exact. All of a sudden he drew a breath and unbent enough that the side of his head pressed against hers. “He said it had to be me,” he said into her hair. “He said I’d keep investigating where others would stop.”

“Well he was right enough about it,” Yeo-jin murmured. She patted his shoulder a few times. There was a count in her head, running too quickly. There was a shout echoing in her memory, Si-mok standing exhausted and furious before Eun-soo’s flower-lined memorial, speaking of fighting and courage; the astonished expressions on his colleagues’ faces. There was no wasted space in him. She patted at him again. “But it was an unfair thing to do to you.”

“Han Yeo-jin,” Si-mok said, his breath on her temple like a blush. Oh, moron, she told herself again.

“What?”

“Is this quickly?”

She had to muffle her snort of laughter in his suit jacket. “Well,” she said, disentangling herself, and shrugged. “I didn’t want to deprive you, Hwang Si-mok.”

 

Late, when the scene was taped off and they had watched the ambulance leave with its burden, and he met her eyes and tipped his head in that sphinx-like way he had, she knew it for gratitude, even if he didn't.


End file.
